Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Wow it's been a while! Quick updates, I'm still unemployed, enjoying a little time off before I drive myself crazy looking for a new job, and have been feeling pretty good. The first couple of weeks were madness, submitting resumes, working part time as many hours as possible and I felt like I was busier than ever. This week is the first week that I've actually found myself with absolutely nothing to do, so here I am! I was eating takeout every day for a while there. I was stressed out and busy and didn't feel like cooking at all. Unfortunately my unemployment hasn't kicked in yet so I'm using a borrowed credit card to get me through until it does. That means that I have not been ordering out because my Mom would be like "what on earth are you doing spending all that money on junk food?!?!?!" and she's right. So I've been shopping and today I finally decided to cook. God I LOVE cooking! Oh how I've missed it and didn't even realize. It's apple season so I bought one of those bags of apples and was thinking about them today. For some reason I was not craving desserts, I wanted a savory apple dish. My friend Abi makes this delicious potato salad with apples in it and that's what was on my mind but I didn't want something summery and lathered in mayo, but the main ingredients of that dish were still appealing to me. I did a quick search and found a recipe on Food Network from Rachel Ray. It was perfect. Potato, apple and onion hash. What to have with it? Well what goes better with apples than pork? I didn't have any pork so I had to go back to the store. I got some nice bone-in chops and some green beans, gotta have some green.

Here's what I did to create this delicious masterpiece:

Baked two potatoes in the microwave for about 10 minutes, let them cool and then cut into pieces.Sauteed two sliced up apples and one small yellow onion in 2T of olive oil and 2T of butter for 5 minutes, add the potatoes, season with salt and pepper, cook for 5 more minutes.

In the meantime, broiled 2 pork chops, seasoned with thyme, garlic powder, parsley flakes, salt and pepper. They took about 7 mins per side.

Boiled some frozen green beans.

Put it all together and enjoy. It was exactly what I was craving... soooooooooo delicious. And the kitchen smelled like fall while I was cooking. So awesome!!

For a little dessert I had some Mi-Del GF Ginger snaps, the perfect compliment!!!

I hope you are all well out there in blogland. I've missed writing, and cooking, and taking photos. Maybe I'll be writing more often. I'm trying to kinda let the energy take me where it will to find what I love and do that. I have too good of an opportunity right now to just jump into the first job that is available. We'll see how it goes!

Edited to add: I have not been reading blogs either.. I have 750 blog posts to read in my gluten free category alone... yikes. :)